Letting the Market Drive Transportation - Bush Officials Criticized for Privatization

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Letting the Market Drive Transportation

Letting the Market Drive Transportation
Bush Officials Criticized for Privatization

By Lyndsey Layton and Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, March 17, 2008; Page A01

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Tyler Duvall was on his way to a departmental retreat in 2006 when he hit 25 miles of traffic on Interstate 270. At the retreat, the Bush administration officials agreed that congestion should be the focus of their remaining time in office.
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When Democrats took control of Congress and stripped most earmarks from last year's federal budget, {Transportation Secretary Mary Peters} took $850 million that would have been shipped to hundreds of municipalities and poured it into Urban Partnerships, a pilot program awarded to five cities on the condition that they test congestion pricing.
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Duvall, 35, is a fourth-generation Washingtonian whose father is a well-connected lawyer. He had no transportation experience when he was plucked from his job handling corporate mergers and acquisitions at Hogan & Hartson and was offered a political appointment at the DOT in 2002. "It was a friend of a friend of a friend sort of thing," he said.

Within four years, he was setting national policy.
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Soon after Duvall arrived at the DOT as a "schedule C" -- the lowest-level political appointee -- Peters asked him to interview for the job of general counsel at the Federal Highway Administration. He lost out to another lawyer -- D.J. Gribbin.

Duvall and Gribbin soon became allies, bonded by a shared passion to inject free-market theory into transportation policy.

Gribbin, 44, grew up well connected to the Republican Party. His father was a longtime aide to Vice President Cheney and a former head of Halliburton's Washington office. The younger Gribbin worked as a lobbyist for the National Federation of Independent Business and as a national field director for the Christian Coalition under Ralph Reed. For six months in 2005, he moved his wife and seven children to Guatemala, where they performed missionary work.

[fasttense]

1. Just another con game on the 300 million American marks. n/t